Alexa, can you get funky? Language in the age of machines

According to the email that dropped into my inbox just now, Alexa knows how to drop a beat. All you have to do is ask ‘Alexa, can you get funky?’ and she’ll show off her skills. I haven’t tried this yet — I turned my Echo off a while ago. After not being able to find a single useful use case for her, I figured the potential privacy implications weren’t worth being able to turn the music on and off with a command occasionally (I say occasionally because background noise or just general tech-fuckwittery often got in the way).

Besides, anyone with an Echo knows that you spend quite a lot of time trying to figure out the correct form of words to get what you want from Alexa. One of my regular clients has one in the office, and watching the disappointment on the Head of Development’s face when he asked ‘Alexa, play some good music’ and got the response ‘Here’s some music you might like: 80’s Rock Radio’ was very entertaining, but not, ultimately, what he was after.

It got me thinking: we all know that teaching AI to understand the infinite variety of human language is a very difficult task. Parsing the exact meaning from people’s choice of words is often difficult for other humans without the extra input from body language, and that’s before we even get on to tricky concepts like irony and sarcasm. But it occurred to me that…